From Coblenz they had gone to Wetzlar, in the vain and illusory hope that there they might find an audience, and receive remuneration. The projected concert never took place, but certain other things did. They spent altogether a week in the sleepy old town. They floated in a little boat up the river, between the rows of poplars and the level meads; they sat under the shadow of the grim old _Heidenthurm_ of the cathedral, and looked over all the landscape below. Adrienne sat upon the wall above Goethe’s _Brunnen_, and looked at the girls coming to fill their pitchers, and said to Sebastian, who was standing beside her, and looking earnestly down at her, ‘I wonder if it was to such a well that Hermann came and helped Dorothea? I could almost fancy so. Could not you?’ ‘I think I could,’ Sebastian had answered, looking, not at the well, but at her. With each day that he saw her, his admiration for her grew greater. She was a fair jewel in a poor setting. Her gentleness, her dignity under trouble and sorrow, her ‘Festen Muth in schweren Leiden,’ impressed him, delighted him. Her flashes of quaint humour, which showed him how gay the spirit she owned might be, if only the sun would shine a little upon its dwelling-place; her grace, her intellect, attracted him irresistibly; and he loved, too, the quiet independence with which she met him; the calm dignity with which she ignored his wealth, his position, his advantages, and treated him as her equal--no more, no less. Amongst the list of events which made, as it were, a gaily coloured, kaleidoscopic pattern in his memory, that week at Wetzlar stood out from the rest, like a little patch of pure gold, like the lucent background on which stands out, pure and clear, some mediæval Madonna. One morning, when he went to call upon them, he found Adrienne in sore distress, which she tried in vain to conceal. She was alone, and he had succeeded at last in getting her to confess what troubled her. A creditor of her father’s pressed hard for a certain sum of money, due long ago. That fact was in itself painful enough, but it alone would not have been sufficient to break down Adrienne’s calm and steadfast courage. It was her father’s manner of accepting, or not accepting, his position, which alarmed and made her wretched. More than once he had uttered dark and oracular hints as to the wisdom of leaving a world which was full of nothing but misery and contradictions. At that time he was in his room, and had refused to see her or speak to her. She did not know what would happen, what he might or might not do; and Sebastian saw the young girl’s courage fail for the first time, for the first time saw her fold her hands, and, with tear-stained eyes, ask piteously, ‘What am I to do?’